Kimberly Peterson ’19, Geosciences
Certificate(s): Environmental Studies
I worked on developing a tool that visualizes hurricane storm surges and waves. This tool would automatically extract data from the National Hurricane Center’s hurricane advisories (either past or present) and input them into a model that predicts the severity of the storm surge along a coastline, primarily the Atlantic coast. This tool would streamline the group’s study of hurricane hazards and risk analysis by condensing the code and time needed to extract data, input them into the model, and generate a visualization. Through this experience, I learned about the inner workings of cluster computers and how to read the programming language Bash. I also gained confidence in my own coding abilities. When a path I explored in the first half of the project did not pan out, I wrote another code which was more successful. I hope to apply my experience and newfound confidence in navigating the research process to my senior thesis and beyond.